Strategic and Institutional Planning

Strategic and Institutional Planning

What is Strategic Planning? The Serious Insights Perspective

Strategic planning creates organizational context. It is the primary means by which an organization sets priorities, plans resources, examines operations, and offers a high-level operation framework for employees and stakeholders. The strategic plan brings together high-level goals as a way to signal consensus on shared outcomes. A strategic plan sets direction and offers a differentiated organizational approach to the market so that competitors, and their actions, can be properly assessed. The best strategic plans don’t have dates, they have version numbers, because they reflect not the day the plan was created, but the moments in which it is being applied. Every strategic action changes the plan and the plan should be an on-going, realtime tool for decision making and organizational assessment. Every strategic action should be made against the backdrop of the plan, and the plan should immediately reflect the impact of the decision and regular updates should be made as decisions play out. Strategic plans should be plans of action, not just a statement of intent.

Strategic planning typically answers the following questions:

What is our mission and purpose?

Vision: What do we want the organization to become?

What do we offer now and what should/can we (do we have permission) to offer in the future?

Who are our offers for? (what base of customers do we serve?)

What do we do that is unique? What differentiates us from other businesses?

Do we have competitors? If so, how do we become the supplier or service of choice?

What is our current culture and how to we align it to execute our strategy?

What internal and external strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats do we face?

What are our goals and objectives: financial, customers, internal business processes and people?

How have past actions influenced, changed or reaffirmed assertions made in the plan?

Institutional Planning

Serious Insights helps educational institutions innovate by decoupling accreditation from strategic planning. This approach allows for educational institutions to be more nimble in the near-term—to plan and execute at the pace of change—and to be more efficient in delivering accreditation materials because much of the work of accreditation becomes a packaging exercise for strategies, definitions and approaches, already documented, being implemented and being assessed.

Serious Insights conduct analysis so that colleges and universities can better understand their strategic context. We employ a number of methods from traditional strategic planning processes to programs that use scenario planning and strategic dialog that move beyond the “strategic plan” so that organizations can act and think more strategically. Serious Insights helps organizations explore their strategic context in order to maximize their unique advantages, improve perceptions, develop vision, redefine their brand or effectively integrate sustainability. Clients will also learn how to upscale their customers and partners to include strategic insights.

“Scenarios and the Future of Education.” Innovate. Fischler School of Education and Human Services, Nova Southeastern University. June/July 2008. Link

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